Divorce Song vs. Fuck and Run

Whip Smart is a weird little record, & v hard to get into; I always get the feeling that the hooks and songwriting are there but it seems, not unfocused, but out-of-focus. "Support System" was no exception...

I (prob lazily) gravitated to the more obvious stuff on there; "Supernova" which was genuine quality alt-radio sellout (another song also in this vein, similarly terrific = "Rocket Boy"), "Chopsticks", and the title track which I love as much as the songs I polled here...

Rocket Boy is a weird one, like it's performed at the wrong tempo or something, reminds me of an Urge Overkill b-side but yet I have a soft-spot for it.

a weird one, like it's performed at the wrong tempo or something,

85% of WS imo...

"fuck and run", no regrets, even when i was 12. "divorce song" is excellent, much more subtle, but f'n'r just kills me. one of my very favorite songs of the 90s.

"rocket boy" is great, too, love that slightly sickly power pop sound. more matthew sweet than urge overkill to my ears. tbh, i might prefer it to "divorce song"...

rocket boy is great, but saying it is better than divorce song is a bit o madness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcox-WLQhCQ

I think what you're talking about is the way Phair will stretch a single syllable, a single note, over six or eight bars. She takes such liberties with song structures and melodies...! stretching out RRRRROOOOOOOOOO-CCKKKEEEEEEEEEEETTT, and then whip back with: Rocket Boy! I feel like it took the whole of Whip Smart to be able to write a song like that...

Man it sucks so bad that her career jumped the rails, and she ended up having to play as Avril's horny mom: I'm wondering if she could've been the female Prince...

now that i've said it, i'm struck by how much liz's sound resembles matthew sweet's. "divorce song" maybe more than "rocket boy" (which is at least half fastbacks).

and drug money OTM, "divorce" seems objectively better than "rocket boy", the lyrics are certainly some of the most striking phair ever wrote, but something about the sound of rocket boy rips me to pieces. the ache isn't communicated by anything she says, it's in the chord progression and harmonies, and i'm kind of helpless before it. get the same thing from "teenage kicks" and "another girl, another planet", btw.

fwiw

:D

whitechocolatespaceegg: have you heard it contenderizer? is it worth getting?

Scott Miller, formerly of Game Theory, seems to think it was the best album of 1998

no, i dunno. i loved exile and played it hundred of times in 93/94, but drifted away after whip smart, like i'd hit my limit. was just thinking that i need to go back and spend some time with WCSE.

listening to WCSE now, sounding good! kinda trippy/murky, but the songwriting is ace. plus downloaded legally purchased a couple discs worth of demos & outtakes, looking forward to that...

Girly Sound stuff...?

nah, it's apparently a 30-track boildown of 7 tapes worth of whitechocolatespaceegg demos that some hardcore fan bought off a guy who'd inherited them somehow. has a super warbly, lo-fi voice & gtr demo of "rocket boy"! (listened to that first cuz i couldn't wait.)

four tracks in, WCSE is shaping up beautifully. criminal to have ignored it for so long.

really? that's some good news!

yeah, i'm baffled in retrospect by the lukewarm reviews i seem to remember reading. the tunes are strong, the production is interesting but sympathetic, and the lyrics wicked sharp. allmusic review claims that WCSE suffers from a kind of artistic distancing, that it's "the work of a craftsman, not an inspired work of brilliance like Exile." which makes approximately zero sense to me. both seem equally well-crafted to me, and WCSE loses no emotional immediacy for its pop ambition. probably just too slick and "mature" for its era/audience. sad, but well worth rediscovering.

with the caveat that i've only heard about half of it so far...

WCSE reminds me of fables of the reconstruction relative to exile's murmur. or alien lanes vs. propeller/bee thousand. but, you know, i like fables and alien lanes, so...

liked Fables more than Murmur iirc BUT this is not the thread for my weird R.E.M. hangups

listening to a couple of songs from this (all I have time for right now); I like it so far--missing a bit of the sensual, langorous awkwardness that marked her previous work, but songwriting seems top notch...

does lose some steam towards the end, but i really like at least 2/3 of it, and for a 16-track album, that's damn good.

missing a bit of the sensual, langorous awkwardness that marked her previous work

agree w this

in retrospect, i guess i'd put it on par with whip-smart, maybe a slight cut below (lyrics are less vivid, production a bit flat). if that sounds indifferent, i count exile and whip-smart among my favorite albums of the 90s, so it's in damn good company.

WCSE is underrated and totally great imo, glad you are getting into it!. I love at least 2/3 of Whipsmart as well.

WCSE is almost a masterpiece. "Almost" because it starts with one of her most misguided productions and has two or three non-entities.

I'd rank her albums:

Guyville
WCSE
Liz Phair
Whipsmart

I thought the title track was okay, not on the level of Whip Smart/Rocket Boy/Divorce Song/Fuck and Run/Explain it to Me*, but I wouldn't call it 'misguided' at all...

*lining up those five songs like that = WOW!!! a million "Why Can't I"s + H.W.C. can't take those career highs away from her...

"misguided" insofar as the arrangement/mixing choices go kerplooey.

btw I ravaged this album in my college newspaper: I was one of those fools who thought the expensive production was a mistake (this from a guy who's adored pop forever and whose favorite single that year was "Torn"). When I compiled a top ten at the end of the year, I made sure to wear a hairshirt.

i love the title track! it's only towards the end of the album that i think it begins to taper off and repeat itself. no problem w the first 10 tracks (give or take). maybe don't need "baby got going", i dunno...

"Shitloads of Money" and "Girls Room" are lovely.

Guys, is "Bollywood" really THAT bad? bcz I say no

I remember Matador being very surprised at the sales drop-off of WCSE from her previous efforts.

listening to it ("whitechocolatespaceegg") right now. LOVE the song & production, so dreamy & spaced out, then *boom* this massive and oddly downbeat tower of a chorus just explodes up and out of it. "every hollow has its favorite sound" <3<3<3

and, see, "shitloads of money" bugs me for some reason. melody doesn't move me, and for once, the limitations of her voice hold the song back. "girls room" might be the most beautiful thing on WCSE tho.

i've only heard the album 3 times in less than 24 hours, but i got opinions 4 U

"Go On Ahead" and "Polyester Bride" are my kind "mature" rock and roll.

lol I've heard two songs once each, but Alfred u r eight shades of RONGNESS!

(title-track's dreamy spaced out vibe kinda reminds me of that twangy guitar sound that they always played whenever Sam's ladder appeared at MJH's bedroom window in "Clarissa Explains It All")

I'll relisten cuz y'all said so, but from my recollection I disliked how the mooncalf sentiments of the lyrics (nothing wrong with songs to/for babies, but this one is dopey) finds an aural correlative.

imagining an alternate reality where Liz became more mooncalf, hooked up w/ Isobel Sollenberger and decided to hitchhike cross country while also selling weed...

would buy

in retrospect, alfred basically OTM, though we have our differences. co-sign on "polyester bride" and "go on ahead", two of the strongest songs on the album (listen to those, drugs!)

i guess the album is a bit overlong, its only real defect, imo. maybe liz felt she had to keep proving that she had songs to burn in the wake of exile's success? hard to say, but even with some redundancy, WCSE feels like a late-20th-century classic, fit to hold its own with the likes of elvis costello and bruce springsteen in the literate rock songwriting sweepstakes.

my favorites:

Whitechocolatespaceegg
Big Tall Man
Perfect World
Johnny Feelgood
Polyester Bride (yeah, all of the 1st 5 tracks)
Uncle Alvarez
Go On Ahead
Ride
What Makes You Happy
Girl's Room

okay, so i played a few tracks off this for a musically-inclined friend last night, and he wasn't all that into it. i mean, he kinda dug some songs, but wasn't blown away. and it made me reevaluate, or at least think about why WCSE works for me.

one of the things that really bugged him was the last line of the "polyester bride" chorus: "do you wanna flap your wings and fly away from here?" i could see where he was coming from. it's the sort of line that we don't ordinarily allow, delivered without semblance of edge or irony, at the very least risking schmaltz. it's not indie, not punk, insufficiently cynical to read as "smart" by those standards. but it works for me - i accept that she's coming from a different place, no longer the self-lacerating cynic observing her own mistakes from the sidelines with a cigarette and a sneer. that the album occasionally reminds me of 10,000 maniacs doesn't strike me as a bad thing.

Johnny Feelgood
Uncle Alvarez
What Makes You Happy

These are all-time classics imo

alvarez & WCSE title track are in my top 5 phair

one of the things that really bugged him was the last line of the "polyester bride" chorus: "do you wanna flap your wings and fly away from here?" i could see where he was coming from. it's the sort of line that we don't ordinarily allow, delivered without semblance of edge or irony, at the very least risking schmaltz. it's not indie, not punk, insufficiently cynical to read as "smart" by those standards.

But the whole song, especially the chorus, builds to that line, and note how her voice rises (and cracks) on the "away from here" line – all well done.

Tell him to leave this indie/punk nonsense, especially since cynicism is basically disillusioned romanticism ;)

yeah, no, i mean OTM. i love the song. it's nowhere near so one-dimensional as that line looks in isolation. but it's always weird & disappointing to share something you like with someone who doesn't...

haven't really listened to Whitechocolatespaceegg since it came out (thought it was decent but uneven at the time) but listened to a few tracks because of this thread. really disliked uncle alvarez and polyester bride at the time so its weird to see how much y'all dig those songs

those are the two whose sensibilities are closest to EIG.

hmmm, don't really get that

They are. Listen past the gloss and you get more story-songs about a woman, now approaching thirty, making do.

That's why I love WCSE. Where Whipsmart was a treading-water record, this one sounds like the natural sequel to Guyville.

i thought What Makes You Happy did that a lot better. i remember at the time that half the record was like exile part II and the other half was more like a AAA move, hence the uneven quality. also, didn't she labor over this for like 5 years with multiple producers? you can sorta hear the indecision.

how are you defining "AAA move" – sonically, philosophically? The whole thing sonically is an AAA, which almost twelve years later strikes me as revolutionary as Butch Vig's production for Nevermind. I remember arguing with fans at the time (mostly guys, of course) who thought the sonic spritz was a betrayal or something.

*is an AAA move

those are the two whose sensibilities are closest to EIG.

― ginny thomas and tonic (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 6, 2011 9:20 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm, don't really get that

― buzza, Friday, May 6, 2011 9:25 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, honestly, i dunno about that, either. both songs are distinct from EIG in the manner suggested by the allmusic review i quoted earlier: basically, they lack guyville's angsty, scab-picking immediacy. this places more emphasis on songwriting as craft and (perhaps) increases the sense of distance between artist and subject, artist and audience. i found fault with that review only in that it casts this difference as a failure to be "real", which seems silly, but i won't deny the existence of substantial differences in phair's creative POV on WCSE. when we want to praise this kind of thing, we describe it in terms of maturity and artistic sophistication...

rhetorically, the much-discussed "lo-fi" production invokes the artless neophyte in her bedroom, recording alone with whatever's at hand because she's got to get this stuff out. less "confessional" than diaristic imo, but that's not important right now. that it's an obvious pose has always been part of that record's magic for me.

i mean, take "uncle alvarez" by way of contrast. there's no suggestion that it was recorded "at home", and authorial myth-building is sacrificed in favor of engagement with the stories of others. it's a discrete snapshot unrelated to any overarching, supposedly confessional narrative.

can's say the same of "polyester bride", of course, but even there, the expansive sonics and reduced cynicism undercut the portrait of the artist that EIG worked so hard to build.

or, yeah, what roger said...

and btw fwiw imo tbh WCSE does feel less immediate than Exile! the voice is woman in LA, not a girl in Chicago, and even in the midst of Johnny Feelgood obsession, there's a witnessing in place of Exile's experiencing. And you're OTM that part of this has to do with age. The standpoint is actually pretty close to what you get in mid-period Aimee Mann ("you've danced this dance enough to know better by now, but here you go again"), but where Mann would do resignation and agonbite of inwit, Phair goes for a kind of sympathetic facepalm. Which, when it works, hits as hard as e.g. "i want a boyfriend"...

I mean,

mom, i'm sending you this photograph
i swear this one is gonna last
and all those other bastards were only practice

just slays.

"Shitloads of Money" and "Girls School" point nicely towards the next album too, don't they?

(btw, roger, you're wanted in the Tom Petty poll I just started)

"runaway trains"

what's the poll?

I've given most of this a listen now, and so far I like the obviously good ones: Johnny Feelgood, Polyester Bride, Uncle Alvarez, Headache. "Perfect World" is good too. Aimee Mann comparison otm; Liz's Lovesexy?

Which Pitchfork writer can eat a bag of dicks? Stay tuned...

Can someone explain their love of "Uncle Alvarez"? It's one of the few on WCSE that I've never really warmed to, and it bugs me that I can't figure out why. Maybe it sounds a little too coffee-shop, musically, even though I think it's lyrically ace.

As for this poll...a few days before my 30th bday I had this weird urge to listen to EiG, perhaps subconsciously embracing music of adolescence. I started thinking that, pre-age 28, I would've said "Fuck and Run" no question, but now I think it's clearly "Divorce Song."

I haven't been able to stop listening to EiG since, and one thing that struck me is how much I love the sound of the guitars on it. Her playing was really particular and idiosyncratic; she sounds like she's playing almost-chords, there's something off-kilter and maybe inarticulate but also confident about her strums that plays off the words so well. It's kind of unexplainable, the effect those sounds have. They really do sound like my own post-college mid-twenties flailing about.

Maybe it sounds a little too coffee-shop, musically

i guess i don't see this as an inherently bad thing, and as you say, the lyrics are great (catchy tune, too)

I've seriously kept billy's post bookmarked for the better part of a year thinking I will eventually be able to say something to articulate why "Uncle Alvarez" is great. Great lyrics, coffee-shop yeah, but there's a real sympathy to it which I think is nice to find. The premise is a <i>little</i> cornball, like something you would come up with as an assignment for creative writing class, but the little moments pay off. "It's hard to believe you were once a beautiful dancer."

I keep telling myself to start downloading homemade YouTubes I love before they're pulled. The "Divorce Song" video I posted upthread is gone, there was a fantastic one for Yo La Tengo's "Satellite" that's gone, ditto one for Hot Chip's "The Warning."

i wish i'd saved that "divorce song" video too. i watched it so many times it feels inseparable from the song itself to me.

imagining an alternate reality where Liz became more mooncalf, hooked up w/ Isobel Sollenberger and decided to hitchhike cross country while also selling weed...

― schizophrenics think I'm hilarious (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, May 4, 2011 2:59 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A number of years back, I was so excited to see 'Fuck and Run' on a karaoke playlist that I signed up without even thinking, and it wasn't until a verse or so in that I started to remember the lyrics in their entirety. I was flattered by the positive attention I inadvertently drew to my str8 self at the gay bar that night.